Hope Yáo's Arc

Chapter 5 of 5

The Library's seventy-two hour window collapsed in forty-eight when Valor started sweeping the checkpoints with doubled patrols. Hope watched from the auto-shop rooftop as enforcers moved through the blocks she'd mapped, checking IDs and confiscating anything that looked like contraband. She was halfway down the fire escape when the first gunshots cracked through the air. Valor had pushed past their own territory lines — two blocks into Alley Rats ground — and the Rats were pushing back. Hope ran toward the clinic instead of away from it, her first aid case banging against her hip. The street outside her door was already torn up, pavement cracked and scarred with fresh skid marks where vehicles had turned hard and fast. A sleek white drone hovered at the corner, its red and blue lights scanning the chaos, Valor's shield emblem glowing on its undercarriage. Hope pulled the emergency shutters down over the clinic's windows and locked the reinforced door from inside. She moved through the space with practiced efficiency, pulling medical supplies into the back room where the walls were thicker, setting up a triage station that could handle whatever came through when the shooting stopped. The greenhouse The Library had delivered sat in the warehouse two blocks away, untouched and unreachable. The sanctuary she'd been building had a seventy-two hour timeline, but the war had started early. She checked her burner phone. No messages from The Library's contact. The takeover plan depended on Valor staying predictable, contained within their own blocks. Instead they'd spilled out like water through a broken dam, and the Alley Rats had responded with the kind of violence that didn't care about neutral ground. Hope locked the phone in her desk drawer and turned back to the triage station. The sanctuary would have to wait. Right now she had a different job — keeping people alive long enough to see whether The Library could still deliver on their promise, or whether the whole operation had just become another entry in her running tab of costs.